From what I read it's a cluster of roughly 60 Pentium (the original) class CPU cores but is devoid of the usual MMX, SSE and the new AVX instructions in favor of a specialized vector unit (512 bit SIMD design), all running at around 1GHz. In theory each core could do up to 4 threads but that's rarely occurs in reality due to other issues.

The card itself is $2700 and peaks at 225 watts. It's only 2-2.5x faster than the top end Xeon CPU in highly parallelized tasks."Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh." - The Doctor

If it will be programmable via OpenCL we can make use of it even w/o BOINC support as it was done already with early CUDA and early ATi Brook+/OpenCL support.
SETI@home (at least in it's optimized part) usually goes ahead of BOINC "official" support.
What we really need is hardware availability for test and free development tools for it.SETI apps news
We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them.

If it will be programmable via OpenCL we can make use of it even w/o BOINC support as it was done already with early CUDA and early ATi Brook+/OpenCL support.
SETI@home (at least in it's optimized part) usually goes ahead of BOINC "official" support.
What we really need is hardware availability for test and free development tools for it.

You get almost One teraflop with one GTX 500 series (5xx) card at a fraction of the price. What is the business case here?

Double precision. For full-up supercomputers, that's an important consideration and the PHI 1 TFLOPS is a lot better than the direct competitor NVIDIA Tesla K10 at about 0.19 TFLOPS DP.

For SETI@home which uses mostly single precision, and users who are willing to go with consumer grade GPUs, top GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are likely much better than PHI on a cost/performance basis. But it would be good if a system with PHI bought for other purposes could also be used for SETI crunching. As Raistmer said, it depends on Intel providing the OpenCL drivers and low/no cost development software.

Hal is right that the high level OpenCL can be translated to x86, both AMD and Intel have drivers which do that for some range of their CPUs. But doing OpenCL on a Sandy Bridge chip is somewhat different than the same on 64 cores each with 512 bit SIMD but lacking some other refinements.

The card itself is $2700 and peaks at 225 watts. It's only 2-2.5x faster than the top end Xeon CPU in highly parallelized tasks.

I believe it is over 1TeraFlop double precision. That's more than 2.5X a Xeon.

The 2.5x is from Intel's own page on the Phi, comparing two E5-2687 (3.1GHz, 8 cores) to one Phi card (1GHz, 60 cores). (footnote 5).

They did see some Monte Carlo simulations run at 10.75x faster comparing two E5-2670 (2.6GHz, 8 cores) to a Phi SE10P (1.1GHz, 61 cores). (footnote 9)

The 1 TFlop DP is theoretical peak performance.

Hello,

You get almost One teraflop with one GTX 500 series (5xx) card at a fraction of the price. What is the business case here?

The number you are looking at on those cards is probably the SP(single precision) rating. Intel is stating TF for DP(double precision). Which generally is less than 1/4 of the SP rating. For instance a Radeon HD 6990 is rated 5099 GF running SP & 1276.88 GF running DP.

SETI@Home application currently only use SP. So the SP performance is what you would want to compare. Currently that isn't really helpful across manufacturers yet.SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours Join the BP6/VP6 User Group today!

You get almost One teraflop with one GTX 500 series (5xx) card at a fraction of the price. What is the business case here?

Double precision. For full-up supercomputers, that's an important consideration and the PHI 1 TFLOPS is a lot better than the direct competitor NVIDIA Tesla K10 at about 0.19 TFLOPS DP.

For SETI@home which uses mostly single precision, and users who are willing to go with consumer grade GPUs, top GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are likely much better than PHI on a cost/performance basis. But it would be good if a system with PHI bought for other purposes could also be used for SETI crunching. As Raistmer said, it depends on Intel providing the OpenCL drivers and low/no cost development software.

Hal is right that the high level OpenCL can be translated to x86, both AMD and Intel have drivers which do that for some range of their CPUs. But doing OpenCL on a Sandy Bridge chip is somewhat different than the same on 64 cores each with 512 bit SIMD but lacking some other refinements.

Joe

The Tesla K20 is 1.17 TFlop peak DP. Also a 225 watt card. The K20X is 1.31 TFlop peak DP at 235 watts. The K20X are used in the new #1 in the Top500 supercomputer list.

If it will be programmable via OpenCL we can make use of it even w/o BOINC support as it was done already with early CUDA and early ATi Brook+/OpenCL support.

Keep in mind these are fully compatable x86 CPU cores.
If the software runs on a Xeon system, it will run on a Phi card without any changes. Of course if you do work the code to take advantage of Phi then you'll get even greater improvements in performance than just by running it as is.Grant
Darwin NT